Last year, Axa Strategic Ventures was launched by France-based insurance and financial services provider Axa as the end result of a pilot process that began in 2012, according to the fund’s chairman and managing partner, François Robinet, in an interview with GCV at the time.
The unit is equipped with €200m ($211m) in capital and, as its name suggests, will act strategically, targeting startups developing insurance, asset management, healthcare service and financial technology with a team of eight investors and three support staff.
Axa Strategic is meant to connect with the company’s broader digital strategy, which involves investment in digital information and data analytics, and the establishment of Axa Labs, a Silicon Valley-based unit tasked with detecting emerging digital trends and launching digital initiatives. However, the company perceived there was still a missing element in the strategy involving external innovation.
“So three years ago we [launched] what I would describe as a pilot,” Robinet explained last year. “We set up a small fund linked to our French business, Axa France, which is the largest entity within the Axa Group – and also diversified, so there is [access] to health, life, a corporate business, group business and individual business – and the fund invested at seed stage in startups in the French ecosystem.
“The fund was only €10m and the idea was to see how it works. The initiative has worked quite well in that we have been able to find some good opportunities and identify some very interesting startups that are relevant to our business, and we have been able to close deals with these startups, so from that point of view it has worked well.”
The fund invested in six France-based data and fintech startups and now intends to apply the experience garnered through the fund on a wider stage through Axa Strategic, which will be stage-agnostic and invest internationally.
“We will be looking at all stages of development for companies,” Robinet said. “The fund [that invested] in the French market was small, and therefore focused on seed and early-stage investments. Axa Strategic Ventures will invest at all stages – early stage and seed but also at a later stage for venture and growth [investments].”
Axa’s website lists 19 early-stage deals, including MedLanes, Bee, Blockstream, Neura, GoldBean, Pricemethod and CoPromote, but none so far in the later, ‘capital’ segment.
A key element of forming those commercial relationships will revolve around using Axa’s global presence to help its portfolio companies expand internationally, and a big impetus behind the formation of Axa Strategic was to capitalise on dealflow outside of France, which will lead it to investments in the US and, in time, the rest of the world.
Here, Robinet is helped by keeping his role as CEO of Axa Life Invest. As a former chief risk officer and treasury executive since 1994, after he completed his master’s at Stanford University, he is a verteran in seeing how Axa has evolved over the past 20 years.